Sarah Rees Brennan was born in Ireland by the sea, and is the New York Times bestselling, Carnegie nominated and World Fantasy award shortlisted writer of many novels of YA fantasy. After living in New York, London and Melbourne she came home with late-stage cancer and after beating cancer, settled by a centuries-old library. Her first work of adult fantasy, Long Live Evil, the story of a dying young woman who walks into the dangerous fantasy world of her favourite novel, comes out in the UK on August 1 2024…

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Welcome to the Hive and our Women In SFF feature, Sarah. Firstly, congratulations on your wildly fun adult fantasy debut, Long Live Evil. Can you tell our readers a little bit about it?

Thank you so much for having me at the Hive! I love bees AND fantasy, so this is the perfect place for me!

LONG LIVE EVIL is about a young woman who loves books, has strong opinions and a favourite book series with a favourite character in that… and who is dying. She’s offered the chance to step into the world of her favourite book, where she wakes up as a villain sentenced to death… by her favourite character, the ruthless Emperor. So she turns to the other villains of the tale, including an axe-murdering maidservant and a cursed lord, and together they hatch a plot to avert their doom. It’s a multiple-POV epic fantasy with a twist, asking why do we love the bad guys? Who’s to say who the bad guys are? What would make you become a villain?

Tell us more about the world of Eyam. What inspired its creation? Did you have a mood board to help with the aesthetic and atmosphere of the kingdom? 

I can’t visualise things in my mind, so even with high fantasy I had to have touchstones in the real world.

There’s the Burren, cliffs in Ireland that were filmed as the ‘Cliffs of Insanity’ in the Princess Bride film. That inspired the Dread Ravine, a very high fantasy style abyss full of flame.

There’s Ischia. My bestie is half-Italian and lives in Italy, so we went to Ischia together for a birthday, and there on a high hill under the moon is Castle Aragonese. Where there was order of nuns called the Poor Clares, and when a nun died, they’d put her in the stone chair and visit her to remind them of mortality…  and thus was born the Palace on the Edge, where the kings in waiting dwell at the edge of the dread ravine. But we all live on the edge, don’t we?

There’s Eyam, which is a plague village in England, though it’s not pronounced the same. Long Live Evil was written after I had a serious illness, and during Covid, which is especially a scary time for those low immunity.

There’s a dash of Paphos Castle in Cyprus there too, and rooms within the Palace on the Edge are stolen from Versailles, the Paris Catacombs, and the Sedlec Ossuary. For the country itself I did some cod-medieval England to have fun with common fantasy tropes, but many details are taken from Vienna, Rome, and the Hungarian-Austrian Empire. Many empires. I’m not so interested in how empires are built, but I’m fascinated by the traces of influence they leave behind, how cruelty but also new ideas shape landscape and language. The Roman Empire may be my Roman Empire…

Let’s discuss your characters in more detail. Tell us more about Rae, what drives her? 

Rae’s hell bent on survival at all costs. She’s a cancer patient, and I was one myself, and I tried really hard to be a ‘good’ patient and still got flak for not being good enough–not ‘patient’ enough, not able to recover quicker. I thought, what if this happened to someone really different from me? A natural leader, likely to throw a rager against the dying of the light. How bad would people think she was? And would she deserve an unhappy ending–and do happy endings only happen to those who deserve them? She’s also fun to write because she’s a wild schemer, who zigs where everybody else zags, with a ton of reckless confidence.

She’s also someone who really cares about stories, who truly loves her favourite character… but right now, she’s telling herself that can’t matter. She’s telling herself a story she’s trying to believe – which everyone does – and trying to sell everyone a story about herself that she doesn’t entirely believe. Which I think everybody does as well. But by inhabiting a story, you can make it true without meaning to.

And how do you think you’d fare if you were in Rae’s shoes in Eyam? 

I would definitely die. I’m a coward, and I’m not a team player – I love my friends, but I share my joys, not my sorrows. If in trouble I tend to go off on my own and hide under the bed. I would definitely come up with a wild scheme, but it would fail or my nerve would break. Off with my head! You build a world to be dangerous, you have to know it would kill most people off.

What of your other female characters? Who was your favourite to write and why?

You have to love every character, and I do. I loved writing Lia, because she’s (I hope) a surprise for readers, and hugely influenced by one of my favourite books (which I keep back because it’s a spoiler). I loved writing Emer, because she’s so gruff and physical–and she’s channelling all that into being the best ladies’ maid ever. Axe murders can come later! There’s a aristocrat-disdaining blacksmith called Forge Strike who I wrote on the principle of ‘think about why this stock character is a man or a woman, and switch whoever it is’ and now she’s real and compelling to me.

I also have to ask… which was the most enjoyable unhinged villainous character to write and why?

Key of the Cauldron. He really has no brakes, and doesn’t understand the concept of brakes. And that means he’s so sincere – he loves you or you barely exist to him and he might kill you. The guy’s not right, but he’s so much fun.

Ok just for fun, which of your characters would you fuck, marry, kill?

Fuck – You know, the Harlot of the Tower has a lot of wild schemes and imagination… But then, the Villain of the Cauldron is extremely flexible and also into a wild scheme… It would be crucial to set an alarm early the morning after and get out before Rae or Key woke up, and the chaos began.

Marry – The Golden Cobra without question. Kind, handsome, makes it rain jewels and gold? Can sing, can dance, refuses to handle a sword even a little. If he waltzed into my life to take control of the finances, and set up a book club to hang with me at parties? RIP to a certain someone, but I’m different.

Kill – You have to read the book to know who I’d kill. ’Cause oh boy, I killed them. 😉

Long Live Evil twists villain tropes in deliciously fun ways. Which tropes were your favourite to explore? Were there any you had set out to subvert from the beginning?

I love to subvert a trope. I set out to subvert them all. They’re like snowglobes to me. I’m always picking them up and shaking them with fiendish glee. My writer friends say that’s both a weakness and a strength of mine. Because I also love the richness of a fulfilled archetype, and subverting a trope is even more meaningful if you’ve explored it to the glorious fullest.

Having Rae walk into a story was a bit of a cheat code for me there. She’s thinking, oh you’re the incorruptible white knight, you’re the mercenary minor villain, you’re the flawless heroine. She’s remembering a story where they are their fullest archetypes–but was that story ever true? We’re always judging books by their covers and people by their surfaces. If you look at a character as if they’re a person and go, ‘why are you acting this way?’ they’re instantly more interesting, and the reason may surprise you.

It’s the same with tropes.

If you were to have your story adapted, what medium would you choose—anime, Netflix series or feature length film? Who would you cast for your main character? 

A TV series for sure, whether it was Netflix or somewhere else. (I love Netflix for giving me Shadow and Bone and Bridgerton, but then I love AMC for making Interview with the Vampire. I’m flexible!) This series is a multiple-POV ensemble show, so I’d want to make sure they all got their justice and their points of few–and if they have fans, I want fans to get their justice as well.

For Rae, hmm. Olivia Rodrigo would be a great pick, though she’s young – I think she can bring the rage, and also it’d be important for our villainous leading lady to be able to do a musical.

Who are the most significant women in SFF who have shaped and influenced your work? 

First of all, Tamora Pierce. The Alanna books were the very first fantasy I ever read. I was an avid reader, but mostly of classics like Austen and Trollope. So Tamora Pierce was my standard for fantasy – I went in expecting a ton of stories centring on the ladies!

Diana Wynne Jones. Just as funny and inventive as Terry Pratchett (who I also love). Fight me.

Ed: No fights here, totally agree

Lois McMaster Bujold. Hilarious, invokes the regency tomfoolery of Georgette Heyer and the doomed by the narrative of Richard III–in space!

My recent favourites and influences are Ann Leckie, Leigh Bardugo, Tamsyn Muir, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Alix E. Harrow, N.K. Jemisin, Holly Black, Megan Whalen Turner, Seanan McGuire, Fonda Lee, Carmen Maria Machado, Tasha Suri and Naomi Novik – all writers who take real risks with their work, are funnier than people realise, and change the way I think.

Tell us your top three villains from either books, movies or tv series? 

Richard III. Also a historical figure! I find it fascinating that (as he was writing in the time of the next royal line) Shakespeare had to blacken someone’s name, but by doing so he had to make him evil and unforgettable. Someone who could seduce a widow at the funeral of her husband WHO HE MURDERED. If anyone wants to blacken my name in future centuries, please also describe me thus.

The Darkling. Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse books. ‘Make me your villain’ is such a banger line. It really does get you thinking–how does the pressure of the world make people into villains? Does it comfort us to make other people our villains, so we don’t confront the darkness in ourselves ?

Oh listen, you can’t ask me to pick just three, I’m an evil rulebreaker and I simply won’t. Marvel’s Loki, Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Regina Mills from Once Upon A Time, The Forsyte Saga’s Soames Forsyte, Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp, King Lear’s Edmund, Interview with the Vampire’s Lestat, all villains with sympathetic backstories, great wardrobes, sly wit. They had me from their first heinous deed. I like a villain who loves a lot, who sins a lot, who has many redemptive qualities–who sometimes passes up the opportunity for redemption, and sometimes takes it. But you know redemption will always be hard for them, for the very reasons they were evil in the first place.

What more can we expect from the Time of Iron series, Sarah? What secrets can you share?

I wrote something in the TIME OF IRON series my poor publishers WEREN’T expecting next! And now they have to deal with it.

There is another kingdom in the mix, and you’re going to learn a lot more about them, their gods, and their blood feuds…

A lot of people are engaged to be married in the next book. And relatedly, there are more gods, monsters and murders. Plus shit always gets real in a fantasy novel when a (redacted) appears.

Finally, what is the one thing you hope readers take away from your writing?

Oooh, that’s a tough one. I always hope they laugh and remember laughing, there’s a unique joy in laughing helplessly at a story. I hope they cry for the same reason–finding the depths of pain and empathy inside themselves. Perhaps the one true thing, though, is that stories to me are about connection. Reading something, and realising you’re feeling something that other people have felt before you. Even at your lowest, you are in company.

There doesn’t have to be a lone hero. I want to say to everyone, ‘You’re not alone. You can come be a villain with me.’

Thank you so much for joining us today!

Long Live Evil is due for release 1st August, you can pre-order your copy HERE